This is a round-up, with brief comment, of novels I've read in recent months but not discussed here yet. (The recent "clearing my throat" and Kindred posts began as part of this one, but I went on longer than I intended with both.)
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. My father bought this years ago, I think because it's on that Modern Library best English-language novels of the 20th Century list. He wasn't thrilled, didn't see what the point was, so he gave it to me. It sat on my shelves for years; on a whim, this January I decided to read it. I thought it was quite good, but I don't have much to say about it at this point. There's some beautiful writing in it, none of which I noted or wrote down. I remember a diverse array of Arab characters, the desert, a white man succumbing to madness in a closet, his wife held against her will, attempted escape.
The Sportswriter and Independence Day by Richard Ford. I had never considered Richard Ford as a writer I needed to bother with. A friend had expressed distaste, because he said he didn't care about the characters, lumping him in with Don DeLillo. Since this is not something I would ever say, it's not clear why I let that influence me, other than the fact that there's a lot to read, and I hadn't come across any compelling counter reason urging me to read Ford. Until, that is, Steve Mitchelmore's excellent piece at Ready Steady Book about the new The Lay of the Land, which, with these two, completes the Frank Bascombe trilogy. I'm grateful to Steve for that piece: I loved these novels, and I look forward to the The Lay of the Land coming out in paperback when I will read it, too. In his essay, Steve set out to answer what is for him the key question of the books, a question which occurred to me at various points while reading the books, but which I forgot had occurred to me until I re-read the essay: "why is Frank Bascombe writing this?" Steve's conclusion is typically interesting. Anyway, I enjoyed these books immensely. I'm not sure whether I'll have more to say about them, hence the notice here.
Reality and Dreams by Muriel Spark. This is the first Spark novel for me. I gather they get better than this. I wasn't blown away by it. I wasn't bored, either, but the novel seemed to be a sketch of a book. There is a large cast of characters, complexly involved together, which she manages to keep straight without much apparent difficulty. Tom Richards is an aging movie director who has been injured in a crane accident on a shoot. Relatives and friends interact with him, with varying degrees of irritation for him (and he laments the loss of dead friends he once had, such as W.H. Auden, who would have known the right way to do certain social activities), there is some rumination about the nature of reality and dreams (as the title indicates there might be), but it doesn't seem to add up to much. Nevertheless, the nature of the praise I've seen of Spark means that I still look forward to reading other novels of hers. I know some of the famous titles (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, The Ballad of Peckam Rye), but I wonder what some of you think might be the best ones to read next?
The Enigma of Arrival by V. S. Naipaul. Gorgeous. Simply wonderful. Of Naipaul's other work, I'd previously read only The House of Mr. Biswas, which I liked, but this book is nothing at all like it. The middle-aged narrator (Naipaul?), from his vantage point living for years in an English cottage, explores the nature of experience, the nature of writing--including how as a young man he set out to acquire those experiences that are worthy of his writing talent, all the while missing the actual experiences he was having, his actual topics as a writer. He is able to observe other people with great empathy. There are some beautiful portraits here. I think, of all the novels I've read this year, this is the one I'd most want to urge people to read. I think I will have more to say about this book, but for now apparently all I can do is gush.
Dirty Snow by Georges Simenon. Aimée loves mystery and crime novels, and I gave this to her as a birthday present, in the attractive NYRB edition. I thought it looked interesting, too, and thought I'd read it at some point, but it was a packing snafu that forced me to read it on the flight back from California (I had inadvertently checked the book I was reading). It took me a while to get into, but the second half of the book is quite good. The novel takes place in an unnamed country under occupation (Simenon was Belgian, writing in French, and lived in France during World War II). Frank Friedmaier is nineteen and essentially amoral (as the book opens he decides to kill a man for no particular reason). He lives a life of comparative luxury amid general poverty because his mother runs a whorehouse frequented by occupation officers. By the middle of the book, after a series of reckless and often cruel actions, he ends up in custody, where he resolves to "hold out"--he's not going to give them what they want, though he doesn't know what that is. This is when the book becomes most interesting. Frank spends his time thinking (what else has he to do?), ruminating about words, what they mean, what his actions have meant, wondering what is wanted of him, wondering who knows where he is, what has happened to people he knows, discovering joy in unlikely places (a woman who he sees appearing at a window across the yard every morning at the same time--who is she? is she happy? does her husband appreciate her?), and he finally discovers something about himself--he is "a piece of shit" and deserves to die. This is one of Simenon's so-called "psychological novels" and it's a good one (it is compared, on the back of the book, to Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, as "a study of the criminal mind"). The narrative is in the third person, and Simenon's prose is simple, yet hypnotic, especially in this latter section.
Frost by Thomas Bernhard. Of course, I have already posted about this novel. As I discussed in those posts, Frost is recognizably Bernhard, both in theme and method, if the latter seemed not as refined as in the later Bernhard. But ultimately, I did not like this one as much as the other Bernhard novels I've read; I had a hard time finishing it. The final third of the book was tough for me to wade through, and the aesthetic effect was muted.
Tainted Love by Stewart Home. I received this for my birthday--turned out it was on my wish list, and I'd forgotten all about putting it there. I went online to remind myself why: it was this interview with Home, also at Ready Steady Book. Tainted Love purports to be the assembled diaries of Jilly O'Sullivan, a veteran of the 60s underground, who died of a drug overdose in 1979. It ends up being a detailed account of the seedier aspects of the counterculture. I'm not usually drawn to such accounts anymore (I'm weary of stories of the 60s; I may have overloaded on things like Hammer of the Gods, the unauthorized Led Zeppelin biography), but Tainted Love kept me interested. Sullivan's stories are by turns appalling, funny, tedious. And as much as stories of debauchery bore me (and they do), I was not sorry to have read the book. It's mostly entertaining, and I do feel like it presented a fuller picture of what the 60s counterculture was like than what the standard accounts provide. The diaries are introduced and afterworded (?) by Lloyd O'Sullivan, Lilly's son who she was forced (literally) to give up for adoption, in one of the seedier parts of the book. There are three other non-diary segments in the book: two weird "transcripts" of sessions between Lilly and R. D. Laing, the famous psychoanalyst, but in which she acts the part of Patty Hearst to satisfy bizarre fantasies of his; and a chapter, my favorite in the book, that begins with the description of an image from a short film (a man lying on a bed, if I recall correctly), followed by the transcripts of the various voice-overs, which seem to recount events surrounding Lilly's death, as well as discuss history and certain critical ideas of film, such as "the essential falsity of 'realism'".
Kindred, Octavia Butler
It was the hauntology debate that motivated me to move this book higher on my to-read pile. In it, Dana, a black woman, a writer, living in Los Angeles in 1976 with her white husband, Kevin (also a writer), is mysteriously and repeatedly sucked back into the past, into the antebellum South. The trigger pulling her into the past each time appears to be some kind of threat to the life of Rufus, white son of a Maryland slave-holder. After her first visit to the past, Dana learns that Rufus is an ancestor of hers. She realizes that in order for her family to survive, she must continue to protect him. Over the series of visits, she develops a strange connection to him; he knows who she is and where she comes from, as unbelievable as that is. She thinks she can talk to him, try to change his attitudes. But each time she returns to his time, months or years have gone by (versus only minutes or days for her), and she watches in spurts as Rufus grows into a man of his time--ever more cruel, very much the slave-owner in a slave society. With each return, the act of "saving" Rufus becomes ever more indefensible--except that if he dies, she ceases to exist. Let me re-quote k-punk on this:
On one of her trips back, Kevin manages to go with her by grabbing on to her as she senses that it's happening. In their time there, they discuss the world around them. Kevin is surprised that certain aspects seem less brutal than he had imagined (he notices no oversight of the slaves at work, for example). Dana objects--despite himself, he is effectively minimizing the situation. She says:
Along with the horrible fact that Dana must seek to preserve the life of the increasingly awful Rufus, there is Dana's similarly terrible realization that when she is in the past she can't act as she would in her own time. As with her inability to maintain her distance, as in the passage quoted above, other aspects of her personality are fraught with peril. Her clothing (pants) is suspicious. Her very literacy puts her in danger. She is in the past for longer and longer periods before being somehow returned to 1976, which seems to happen only when she actually believes her own life is immediately threatened. Unfortunately for her, the dehumanization and brutality of slavery do not necessarily pose such immediate threats--but that doesn't mean she can't die from injuries sustained in a beating, whether she believed she was in specific danger or not. Since she doesn't know for sure, then, when her life is in actual danger, she finds herself forced to act as a slave in order to survive, to not draw undue attention to herself. She cannot be herself. Some of the most interesting parts of the novel come when Dana is struggling with this realization. She struggles to hold onto herself, to not lose herself in the enforced servility of the slave, even as she comes to understand and respect the varying techniques the slaves employ to live from day to day.
The deep, unbearable ache in Kindred arises from the horrible realisation that, for contemporary black America, to wish for the erasure of slavery is to call for the erasure of itself. What to do if the precondition for your being is the abduction, murder and rape of your ancestors?Yes, that does come through. What also comes through is an almost journalistic (as well as memoir-istic) sense of the horror of slavery. Dana knows a lot about the history of slavery--names, dates, even details of slave narratives (occasionally the presentation of this information can feel like a fact dump)--but she is repeatedly confronted with the brutal truth that, before experiencing it for herself, she really understood nothing at all about it.
On one of her trips back, Kevin manages to go with her by grabbing on to her as she senses that it's happening. In their time there, they discuss the world around them. Kevin is surprised that certain aspects seem less brutal than he had imagined (he notices no oversight of the slaves at work, for example). Dana objects--despite himself, he is effectively minimizing the situation. She says:
"You might be able to go through this whole experience as an observer," I said. "I can understand that because most of the time, I'm still an observer. It's protection. It's nineteen seventy-six shielding eighteen nineteen for me. But now and then, like with the kids' game [they've just witnessed children playing a 'slave auction' game], I can't maintain the distance. I'm drawn all the way into eighteen nineteen, and I don't know what to do. I ought to be doing something. I know that."Butler's (Dana's) prose is transparent, and her accounting of the events is straightforward and unadorned. The first line of the book ("I lost an arm on my last trip home.") dumps us uncomprehendingly into Dana's attempt to tell her story. This is very much a book in which the sequence of events pulls the reader along. What happens next? What happens? I said something about this to Aimée while I was still reading the book. She said, "I don't see what's wrong with that." Well, nothing's wrong with it, I guess. I wasn't complaining, really, just observing. We like to be told stories, we like to know what happens next. Dana's story is compelling, and she tells it well. The details are specific, horrible. And we feel we learn something about slavery beyond the basic facts, something about the experience of slavery itself.
Along with the horrible fact that Dana must seek to preserve the life of the increasingly awful Rufus, there is Dana's similarly terrible realization that when she is in the past she can't act as she would in her own time. As with her inability to maintain her distance, as in the passage quoted above, other aspects of her personality are fraught with peril. Her clothing (pants) is suspicious. Her very literacy puts her in danger. She is in the past for longer and longer periods before being somehow returned to 1976, which seems to happen only when she actually believes her own life is immediately threatened. Unfortunately for her, the dehumanization and brutality of slavery do not necessarily pose such immediate threats--but that doesn't mean she can't die from injuries sustained in a beating, whether she believed she was in specific danger or not. Since she doesn't know for sure, then, when her life is in actual danger, she finds herself forced to act as a slave in order to survive, to not draw undue attention to herself. She cannot be herself. Some of the most interesting parts of the novel come when Dana is struggling with this realization. She struggles to hold onto herself, to not lose herself in the enforced servility of the slave, even as she comes to understand and respect the varying techniques the slaves employ to live from day to day.
On Being Finished Clearing My Throat (I Hope)
I'm been clearing my throat about science fiction and genre and whatnot for some time now. All of this has been preparatory to a post about The Book of the New Sun and The Urth of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. That post is still forthcoming (which is not to say that I've been working on it all this time), but this post is here in part to say that I think I'm more or less through with all the genre-related posts--at least in the way that I've been approaching them. In the future, if I read an apparently "genre" book, if I write about it, I'll try to focus on what the book does or does not do rather than boring everybody with my confusing questions about what might or might not constitute genre. Unless of course I decide otherwise.
I felt the need to do the throat-clearing because I wanted any science fiction readers to know where I was coming from when I finally did write about Wolfe and his books, and because I intended to write something about what sorts of things I have been looking for at different times when I've read science fiction. I read with interest a post Dan Green wrote in January in which he said that he had been persuaded that science fiction "is inherently a kind of experimental fiction"; he thus decided to sample some science fiction
In the end, I merely meant to be saying that what I wanted now from science fiction was, if possible, a "literary" experience--but, of course, I was anxious about appearing condescending toward the genre, or presumptuous about what such a literary effect might be. At least I meant to be clear that I did not mean that I want science fiction that finally ending up being little more than what passes for so-called "literary fiction" (damn, it really is tiresome, isn't it?). Hence, the several rounds of preliminaries.
So, then, to finish up with the throat-clearing exercises. In a comment to an earlier post of mine, I yet again wrote that I had a post Wolfe's books in the works (hey, maybe I'm trying to perfect the genre of the deferred blog post!). Replying to my comment, Scraps welcomed me to the "frenzy of interpretation". I take it that this means that Wolfe's series has been subjected to such a frenzy (I've read very little about it). In the event, I don't actually intend to do much "interpretation"--in this sense, the word implies to me an investigation into "what it all means", explanation of symbols, allegory, etc. I have no trouble accepting that these books are packed full of this stuff (certain Christian symbols seem hard for even me to miss), and may to some extent enhance my enjoyment of future re-readings. But I merely plan to explain why I think it's great and why I think it does provide a literary experience of the kind I felt I wanted from science fiction.
I felt the need to do the throat-clearing because I wanted any science fiction readers to know where I was coming from when I finally did write about Wolfe and his books, and because I intended to write something about what sorts of things I have been looking for at different times when I've read science fiction. I read with interest a post Dan Green wrote in January in which he said that he had been persuaded that science fiction "is inherently a kind of experimental fiction"; he thus decided to sample some science fiction
under the assumption it is a genre that seeks to provide an alternative to "realism" and other conventionally "literary" practices, not just by evoking speculative worlds and looking to the future rather than the past or present but also by creating alternative forms and experimenting with the established elements of fiction (plot, setting, point of view, etc.).I was sort of surprised by this, because I have not come to science fiction persuaded of any such thing. No doubt unfairly, I tended to think of most science fiction as not really experimental at all. So I wasn't coming to it for this reason. And I certainly wasn't coming to it for its predictive powers. In a post on the occasion of the death of Baudrillard, k-punk wrote: "It is a commonplace that science fiction reveals more about the time it was written than it tells us about the future." I agree with this. And I'd agree that learning about "the time it was written" via science fiction could be interesting, especially as part of a kind of cultural studies, but it's also not the kind of thing I'm interested in for a reading experience, except as a byproduct.
In the end, I merely meant to be saying that what I wanted now from science fiction was, if possible, a "literary" experience--but, of course, I was anxious about appearing condescending toward the genre, or presumptuous about what such a literary effect might be. At least I meant to be clear that I did not mean that I want science fiction that finally ending up being little more than what passes for so-called "literary fiction" (damn, it really is tiresome, isn't it?). Hence, the several rounds of preliminaries.
So, then, to finish up with the throat-clearing exercises. In a comment to an earlier post of mine, I yet again wrote that I had a post Wolfe's books in the works (hey, maybe I'm trying to perfect the genre of the deferred blog post!). Replying to my comment, Scraps welcomed me to the "frenzy of interpretation". I take it that this means that Wolfe's series has been subjected to such a frenzy (I've read very little about it). In the event, I don't actually intend to do much "interpretation"--in this sense, the word implies to me an investigation into "what it all means", explanation of symbols, allegory, etc. I have no trouble accepting that these books are packed full of this stuff (certain Christian symbols seem hard for even me to miss), and may to some extent enhance my enjoyment of future re-readings. But I merely plan to explain why I think it's great and why I think it does provide a literary experience of the kind I felt I wanted from science fiction.
iPod rundown - 05/10/07
1. Animal Collective - "Tell it to the Mountain": From the reissued live Hollindagain. Animal Collective are great live, but this track barely captures their chaotic glory. An electronic tone throughout much of it, alongside a sustained more or less wordless vocal is overtaken by some ecstatic, messy, sort of tribal drumming. That's about it.
2. Billy Holiday - "You Turned the Tables on Me": I listen to very little jazz vocal. I tend to prefer Holiday to a singer like Ella Fitzgerald, though many of her songs seem to end on the same note, as she dramatically delivers the final words, which I do find a little off-putting. This lovely song is on Solitude. At our wedding, our first dance was to Holiday's version of "Love is Here to Stay".
3. Arthur Russell - "Let's Go Swimming (Walter Gibbons mix): Like a lot of people, I suspect, I only heard of Russell in the last few years; curious (and unduly obsessed with filling in the gaps of post-punk), I bought the Soul Jazz comp The World of Arthur Russell, which focuses on his disco-related music. I do like his take on disco, but that has not translated into great reverence. Russell's thin and distant vocal was initially off-putting for me, but not too much so. The percussion is great.
4. Feist - "Lonely Lonely": People are raving about Feist's new album, The Reminder (though I have seen rumblings that it represents the adult-contemporification of indie rock). I haven't heard it. This is off her last album, Let it Die, which I bought because we love her cover of the Bee Gees song, "Inside and Out", that appears on it. The album itself is pleasant enough, though I haven't listened to it closely. "Lonely Lonely" is a good one, sounds like a fresh take on a singer-singwriter sound.
5. Wire - "Marooned": Chairs Missing is great of course.
6. Bardo Pond - "Ganges": I often forget about Bardo Pond, but I always enjoy when one of their songs comes on. This 11-minute instrumental begins with alternating channels of psychedelic electric guitar, which fades after less than a minute. The track settles into a slow, mellow fuzz groove; about seven minutes in, drums and guitar get progressively busier above it, before settling down toward the end of the track. Great music to work to. Dilate is the album.
7. Smog - "Cold Blooded Old Times": One of the best songs on Knock Knock. An insistent rock guitar and nice piano, which ends in a great squall of guitar and piano noise. Some lyrics: "the type of memories that turn your bones to glass" and "in this way they gave you clarity, a cold-blooded clarity". I still haven't been able to pick up the new Bill Callahan record.
8. The Jayhawks - "I'd Run Away": For a while, I thought I was interested in keeping up with various stripes of alt-country bands (this didn't last very long; most of them are pretty boring--cf. The Old 97s). One of my favorite such records is Tomorrow the Green Grass, which includes this song. A lot of what I loved about the record was Mark Olson's vocals, and he left the band after this album. So I lost interest, though I know people who swear by the follow-up, Sound of Lies.
9. Outkast - "Liberation": Damn this is a beautiful song. Why do I feel like I've never heard it before? I've had Aquemini for years (since it came out in 1998, I'm sure). At more than 8 minutes, this is one of the longer rap songs I'm aware of. Just drums, piano, bass. I should probably listen to this cd more often.
10. The Vandermark 5 - "Cruz Campo (For Gerhard Richter)": Airports for Light was produced by Bob Weston of Shellac and, of late, Mission of Burma, and it sounds great. This is solid, workmanlike modern jazz, in the traditions of free bop and free jazz. I saw the group play in Chicago at the Empty Bottle (also in the audience: Peter Brotzmann! Joe McPhee!).
11. The Notorious B.I.G. - "Respect": There's a reason Ready to Die is considered a classic. I still don't have much intelligent to say about rap.
12. Miles Davis Quintet - "You're My Everything": The first great quintet, with Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, Philly Jo Jones. This stuff is pretty much the dictionary definition of jazz for me, so it's hard to imagine that there were those who reacted negatively to it at the time. This comes from Relaxin' with Miles.
13. Pixies - "Planet of Sound": I've been sort of bored by the Pixies lately. Or, bored by the idea of them, bored by their position as indie rock gods. But a song like "Planet of Sound" comes on, and well. I've tended to favor the raw, bare-bones, Albini-recorded Surfer Rosa and not given enough attention to the last Pixies album, Trompe le Monde, which gives us this song. It's hard to say why; I'm always surprised by how great it is. There's a lot going on in these songs.
14. Mia Doi Todd - "88 Ways": I'd never heard of Mia Doi Todd before John Darnielle raved about her most recent cd, Manzanita, when it was released a couple of years ago. I bought that album and the earlier, major-label album The Golden State, which includes "88 Ways". I love Todd's voice. Manzanita is beautiful, and its spare production is much more to my liking than is Mitchell Froom's overly busy production on The Golden State. Still, the latter is a good album nonetheless.
15. Belly - "Super-Connected": This is a pretty basic, engaging rock song from the second Belly cd, King. Tanya Donelly's Belly had some good songs, but they were nothing like as good as her previous band, the great Throwing Muses.
2. Billy Holiday - "You Turned the Tables on Me": I listen to very little jazz vocal. I tend to prefer Holiday to a singer like Ella Fitzgerald, though many of her songs seem to end on the same note, as she dramatically delivers the final words, which I do find a little off-putting. This lovely song is on Solitude. At our wedding, our first dance was to Holiday's version of "Love is Here to Stay".
3. Arthur Russell - "Let's Go Swimming (Walter Gibbons mix): Like a lot of people, I suspect, I only heard of Russell in the last few years; curious (and unduly obsessed with filling in the gaps of post-punk), I bought the Soul Jazz comp The World of Arthur Russell, which focuses on his disco-related music. I do like his take on disco, but that has not translated into great reverence. Russell's thin and distant vocal was initially off-putting for me, but not too much so. The percussion is great.
4. Feist - "Lonely Lonely": People are raving about Feist's new album, The Reminder (though I have seen rumblings that it represents the adult-contemporification of indie rock). I haven't heard it. This is off her last album, Let it Die, which I bought because we love her cover of the Bee Gees song, "Inside and Out", that appears on it. The album itself is pleasant enough, though I haven't listened to it closely. "Lonely Lonely" is a good one, sounds like a fresh take on a singer-singwriter sound.
5. Wire - "Marooned": Chairs Missing is great of course.
6. Bardo Pond - "Ganges": I often forget about Bardo Pond, but I always enjoy when one of their songs comes on. This 11-minute instrumental begins with alternating channels of psychedelic electric guitar, which fades after less than a minute. The track settles into a slow, mellow fuzz groove; about seven minutes in, drums and guitar get progressively busier above it, before settling down toward the end of the track. Great music to work to. Dilate is the album.
7. Smog - "Cold Blooded Old Times": One of the best songs on Knock Knock. An insistent rock guitar and nice piano, which ends in a great squall of guitar and piano noise. Some lyrics: "the type of memories that turn your bones to glass" and "in this way they gave you clarity, a cold-blooded clarity". I still haven't been able to pick up the new Bill Callahan record.
8. The Jayhawks - "I'd Run Away": For a while, I thought I was interested in keeping up with various stripes of alt-country bands (this didn't last very long; most of them are pretty boring--cf. The Old 97s). One of my favorite such records is Tomorrow the Green Grass, which includes this song. A lot of what I loved about the record was Mark Olson's vocals, and he left the band after this album. So I lost interest, though I know people who swear by the follow-up, Sound of Lies.
9. Outkast - "Liberation": Damn this is a beautiful song. Why do I feel like I've never heard it before? I've had Aquemini for years (since it came out in 1998, I'm sure). At more than 8 minutes, this is one of the longer rap songs I'm aware of. Just drums, piano, bass. I should probably listen to this cd more often.
10. The Vandermark 5 - "Cruz Campo (For Gerhard Richter)": Airports for Light was produced by Bob Weston of Shellac and, of late, Mission of Burma, and it sounds great. This is solid, workmanlike modern jazz, in the traditions of free bop and free jazz. I saw the group play in Chicago at the Empty Bottle (also in the audience: Peter Brotzmann! Joe McPhee!).
11. The Notorious B.I.G. - "Respect": There's a reason Ready to Die is considered a classic. I still don't have much intelligent to say about rap.
12. Miles Davis Quintet - "You're My Everything": The first great quintet, with Coltrane, Red Garland, Paul Chambers, Philly Jo Jones. This stuff is pretty much the dictionary definition of jazz for me, so it's hard to imagine that there were those who reacted negatively to it at the time. This comes from Relaxin' with Miles.
13. Pixies - "Planet of Sound": I've been sort of bored by the Pixies lately. Or, bored by the idea of them, bored by their position as indie rock gods. But a song like "Planet of Sound" comes on, and well. I've tended to favor the raw, bare-bones, Albini-recorded Surfer Rosa and not given enough attention to the last Pixies album, Trompe le Monde, which gives us this song. It's hard to say why; I'm always surprised by how great it is. There's a lot going on in these songs.
14. Mia Doi Todd - "88 Ways": I'd never heard of Mia Doi Todd before John Darnielle raved about her most recent cd, Manzanita, when it was released a couple of years ago. I bought that album and the earlier, major-label album The Golden State, which includes "88 Ways". I love Todd's voice. Manzanita is beautiful, and its spare production is much more to my liking than is Mitchell Froom's overly busy production on The Golden State. Still, the latter is a good album nonetheless.
15. Belly - "Super-Connected": This is a pretty basic, engaging rock song from the second Belly cd, King. Tanya Donelly's Belly had some good songs, but they were nothing like as good as her previous band, the great Throwing Muses.
Other people on some book stuff
Ellis Sharp reviews another Philip K. Dick novel, Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said.
Noting Tom McCarthy's top ten European Modernists list, Steve Mitchelmore agrees with five and adds five more of his own. In reply to a comment asking whether this kind of categorising isn't irrelevant, Steve says:
Mr. Waggish comes up with an Antifesto I can get behind (and for the most part already follow).
And, Steamboats are Ruining Everything, a blog that is new to me (and whose title makes me inordinately happy), in a great post compares and contrasts three translations of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. I read and enjoyed Fathers and Sons earlier this year, in yet a fourth translation (by Rosemary Edmonds). Aside from being a fine read in its own right, this post seals the deal for me on Constance Garnett's translation of War and Peace, which I have a nice hardcover Modern Library edition of. I'd heard enough grumbling about her translations to wonder if it was so bad I should try a different one. Bud Parr's recent post about the upcoming Pevear/Volokhonsky translation just added another possible option. But I think I'll stick with the Garnett.
Noting Tom McCarthy's top ten European Modernists list, Steve Mitchelmore agrees with five and adds five more of his own. In reply to a comment asking whether this kind of categorising isn't irrelevant, Steve says:
Yes.Excellent.
But I was bored and it's a bit of fun and someone like me 20 years ago would have used it to explore the library rather than picking up the latest "The Adjective of Noun" novel by Sophie Wannabe-Newsnight-Review-panellist.
Mr. Waggish comes up with an Antifesto I can get behind (and for the most part already follow).
And, Steamboats are Ruining Everything, a blog that is new to me (and whose title makes me inordinately happy), in a great post compares and contrasts three translations of Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. I read and enjoyed Fathers and Sons earlier this year, in yet a fourth translation (by Rosemary Edmonds). Aside from being a fine read in its own right, this post seals the deal for me on Constance Garnett's translation of War and Peace, which I have a nice hardcover Modern Library edition of. I'd heard enough grumbling about her translations to wonder if it was so bad I should try a different one. Bud Parr's recent post about the upcoming Pevear/Volokhonsky translation just added another possible option. But I think I'll stick with the Garnett.
Human Novels
A friend emailed me recently to say she thought she understood why I did not like Richard Powers' most recent novel, The Echo Maker, as much as I'd liked his others. She said, "it is by far his most human novel ever – I find the emotions in it to be so raw – it is almost painful to read and I hate to have it be over". I answered, somewhat amused, "you're saying I don't like 'human' novels??" She meant that it's more of a tearjerker, "like a chick flick".
I was amused by the initial comment, in part because I wasn't overly surprised, given that our tastes don't easily mesh (for example, she had a hard time finishing Tom McCarthy's fantastic Remainder because she found the narrator so unpleasant), but also because I am very aware that Powers has often been accused of being a cold writer, that his writing is not "human" (or concerned primarily with characters with whom the reader might identify). It's a strange criticism, and hard to respond to. Hard for me to respond to, anyway, not just because it's something I disagree with about Powers, but because it's not the kind of criticism I would likely ever make about anything. It's not a category of criticism I use or find helpful. As Dan Green might say "if it's not human, then what is it?"
In a post from February that I noticed only a few weeks ago, Scott Esposito wrote about his reading of another Powers novel, Galatea 2.2. Scott, relatively new to Powers, was not liking it as much as he had liked both The Echo Maker and The Gold Bug Variations. In Galatea 2.2, a fictional Richard Powers is Humanist-in-Residence at the Center for the Study of Advanced Studies in Illinois. He becomes involved with Philip Lentz, a cognitive neurologist working on using a neural network to model the human brain (I've read the book twice, but for convenience I am basically paraphrasing the back of the book here). Lentz enlists Powers to teach the various iterations of the network the canonical Great Books. Scott praises this part of the novel, but there is a subplot that he had a problem with. Here's what he says about it:
It's difficult to argue with someone's dislike of a novel. It's more difficult when the dislike is couched in terms that seem so far removed from your own experience of the novel. In this case, I fear that Scott--who has shown an openness to various kinds of non-conventional fiction--is bringing expectations of a certain kind of book to his reading of this one. And I fear that Powers has encouraged this by his recent move toward more conventional psychological fiction (perhaps, too, Galatea 2.2's superficial resemblance to such books lends one to believe these kinds of expectations will be met). Worse, in his phrase "he can do much more than this" Scott appears to be privileging the aesthetics of this kind fiction, over even those more experimental novels he admittedly admires.
Essentially, with Galatea 2.2, Scott is telling Powers to "show not tell". Just as I think it's strange to criticize a novel for not being "human", I think this is a strange criticism of this novel. When Powers the character arrives in Illinois he is damaged, unsure whether he will be able to write again, whether he wants to write again. At some point he has obviously regained the urge to write (he is writing this book), and in doing so he writes about how he and C. came together, tentative at first:
The connection with the rest of the book becomes apparent by the end when in the course of his Great Books survey with Lentz's neural network, he finds himself attached to this network, needing the unlikely relationship that emerges with its artificial intelligence. Powers emerges, through this interaction, as well as through his contact with the other faculty and students at the Center (including Lentz and the grad student, A.; Scott inexplicably finds this latter interaction "creepy"), able to begin writing again, able to write something of the story of his life with C. and the distance that came between them.
I was amused by the initial comment, in part because I wasn't overly surprised, given that our tastes don't easily mesh (for example, she had a hard time finishing Tom McCarthy's fantastic Remainder because she found the narrator so unpleasant), but also because I am very aware that Powers has often been accused of being a cold writer, that his writing is not "human" (or concerned primarily with characters with whom the reader might identify). It's a strange criticism, and hard to respond to. Hard for me to respond to, anyway, not just because it's something I disagree with about Powers, but because it's not the kind of criticism I would likely ever make about anything. It's not a category of criticism I use or find helpful. As Dan Green might say "if it's not human, then what is it?"
In a post from February that I noticed only a few weeks ago, Scott Esposito wrote about his reading of another Powers novel, Galatea 2.2. Scott, relatively new to Powers, was not liking it as much as he had liked both The Echo Maker and The Gold Bug Variations. In Galatea 2.2, a fictional Richard Powers is Humanist-in-Residence at the Center for the Study of Advanced Studies in Illinois. He becomes involved with Philip Lentz, a cognitive neurologist working on using a neural network to model the human brain (I've read the book twice, but for convenience I am basically paraphrasing the back of the book here). Lentz enlists Powers to teach the various iterations of the network the canonical Great Books. Scott praises this part of the novel, but there is a subplot that he had a problem with. Here's what he says about it:
This [subplot] one tells of Richard Powers the recent grad--his relationship with a woman he met while teaching an undergrad class and the writing of his first novel. The problem here is that it always feels like I am reading this narrative at a distance. The characters of young Richard and his love (only known as "C.") feel like 2-D representations of your typical couple at loose ends after college. This part is described, not told, which is a shame, because I have seen what Powers can do, and he can do much more than this. For example:In a comment, Scott says that he finished the novel and ended up not liking it, finding the writing "loose" and "clunky" (I certainly disagree with this), the subplots never coming together for him.Now, there's nothing wrong with this kind of fly-over narration if used sparingly to jet us past certain spots, but when virtually the entire story is narrated in these bland, distant terms, we have a problem. I don't want to be told that "we made a home too familiar for words," I want to see it being made. Moreover, there's no suspense in this plot. We know Powers will write his novel and become a famous author, that his relationship will end badly. The only thing in it for us is a vivid portrayal of it happening, but we're not getting that. And, lastly, halfway through the novel, I'm still not seeing the links between this narrative and the other one.We were alone. For the first time in our lives, neither of us was going anywhere. We navigated from winter night to winter night, in a state where winder starts in October and rages on into May. In an apartment halfway along its forced march from genteel to desperate, we made a home too familiar for words.
It's difficult to argue with someone's dislike of a novel. It's more difficult when the dislike is couched in terms that seem so far removed from your own experience of the novel. In this case, I fear that Scott--who has shown an openness to various kinds of non-conventional fiction--is bringing expectations of a certain kind of book to his reading of this one. And I fear that Powers has encouraged this by his recent move toward more conventional psychological fiction (perhaps, too, Galatea 2.2's superficial resemblance to such books lends one to believe these kinds of expectations will be met). Worse, in his phrase "he can do much more than this" Scott appears to be privileging the aesthetics of this kind fiction, over even those more experimental novels he admittedly admires.
Essentially, with Galatea 2.2, Scott is telling Powers to "show not tell". Just as I think it's strange to criticize a novel for not being "human", I think this is a strange criticism of this novel. When Powers the character arrives in Illinois he is damaged, unsure whether he will be able to write again, whether he wants to write again. At some point he has obviously regained the urge to write (he is writing this book), and in doing so he writes about how he and C. came together, tentative at first:
By mutual agreement, we kept mum and avoided incident. I teased her about her previous incarnations. "Do you have any documentary evidence?"He writes about his impetus to start writing, and about how his writing career had begun to flourish just as the depressive C. was becoming unreachable. His relationship with C. left him unsure of where he stood with himself. His writing in these sections is not "flyover", but I agree that there is a distance in it. Scott says that he has "seen what Powers can do"--that is, tell a psychologically convincing story, as he tried to do with The Echo Maker--write a tearjerker, as my friend would put it. Scott wants to "see" the relationship that Powers is instead describing. I assume this means more "natural" dialogue and psychological investigation into the mind of the Powers character. But to the Powers character, the narrator, these sections are not merely a narrative, they are the pieces of his former life, the damage to which has left him adrift, both as a man and as a writer. The distance is entirely appropriate, not least because he is never able to get to C. He is completely shut out; she recedes further and further from him. Her distance from him necessitates her distance from us. And his distance from her, effects his distance from other people.
At her next conference, she produced a photo out of her backpack. "Documentary evidence of prior lives." Flirting, under deniability's cloak.
The connection with the rest of the book becomes apparent by the end when in the course of his Great Books survey with Lentz's neural network, he finds himself attached to this network, needing the unlikely relationship that emerges with its artificial intelligence. Powers emerges, through this interaction, as well as through his contact with the other faculty and students at the Center (including Lentz and the grad student, A.; Scott inexplicably finds this latter interaction "creepy"), able to begin writing again, able to write something of the story of his life with C. and the distance that came between them.
Jamestown and the NYTBR
There's been quite a bit of noise in the lit blogs about Matthew Sharpe's new novel, Jamestown. I don't know if I'll get around to reading it, but I did read Susannah Meadows' lame review of it in The New York Times Book Review. It gets off to an irritating, cutesy start:
Scott Esposito, who has read Jamestown, has a fuller critique of Meadows' review (he quotes from another, silly part of the review, in which Meadows talks about how boring it is listening to or reading about other people's dreams).
Incidentally, I read this review in the print edition of the Review, which just reminded me, yet again, why I think the NYTBR is generally worthless. The cover is black, with a red-trimmed circle (it looks like a dartboard) in the middle, at the center of which is a skull-and-crossbones, above and below which are the words "Bad For You". Images of vice (alcohol, cigarettes, pills) are spoked out towards the edge of the circle. At the bottom of the page is a mock Surgeon General's warning that reads: "Benjamin Kunkel on Nirvana - Joe Queenan on bad books - Diane Johnson on New Age spirituality - Tom Carson on Warren Zevon". Other reviews are of books about drug addiction, smoking, teenagers, gambling, etc. That's right: it's another theme issue. Stuff that is bad, or bad for you.
There's nothing inherently wrong with a theme issue of a publication (although I find this particular theme pandering and uninspired). But the theme issue is apparently one of the few organizing principles available to Sam Tanenhaus. A few weeks ago, there was the "Fiction in Translation" edition. I didn't see this issue, but it got a lot of notice in the blogs--see The Literary Saloon's comment here, as well as Levi Asher's coverage at LitKicks here. In Asher's post he says: "I don't generally love 'theme issues', but the NYTBR can do an issue like this anytime they want." Fair enough, right? We'd all like to see substantial coverage of serious fiction, and especially of fiction in translation, which is too often ignored in this country. An issue devoted entirely to fiction in translation helps, so I have no complaint with that individual edition of the Review. My problem is that it's clear that such an issue is a token. I doubt that the NYTBR is ever going to consistently put out issues that cover serious fiction, translated or otherwise, in a serious way (or even serious non-fiction in a serious way). The Literary Saloon complains about the NYTBR quite a bit (here's a representative post, from just two weeks prior to the "Fiction in Translation" edition), and with good reason--except that I wonder why they and others bother.
In many respects, of course, I'm far from the best person to weigh in on the relative merits of the NYTBR (which is why I usually avoid doing so). I've never liked its coverage of books. This is why I went online in the first place: book review sections didn't come close to filling my need, and, oddly, they still don't. (The Literary Saloon often notes, rightly, that the coverage at the NYTBR is heavily weighted toward non-fiction. It would take a separate post that I'm not likely to write to get into my considerable political problems with the non-fiction coverage itself.) Because I don't like its coverage, I tend not to seek it out. I don't, for example, know how often it actually is organized around a theme, and I really don't care. I do know that I check in every so often (like when I pick up the Times for Aimée), and rarely am I impressed. Obviously, it occasionally includes a good review of a book worth reviewing, but these are exceptions. My assessment of the NYTBR's value, then, arises from personal, but not regular, observation of issues over a period of several years (not just the admittedly worse Tanenhaus era), combined with reading the continuous complaints from other bloggers who seem to care a lot about it. Conclusion: it's terrible. Solution: stop caring.
Americans have been very, very bad. Gluttonous, warmongering, nonenvironmentally conscious bad. In Matthew Sharpe’s strange and strained “Jamestown,” set in the post-apocalyptic future, everything is ruined, even the country, even the people. Brooklyn and Manhattan are fighting each other; the Indians have, inexplicably, retaken the South. The East River is goopy (or goopier). The Chrysler Building is rubble. Hares stalk the dead landscape biting off the heads of rodents. If Sharpe’s book had come out in the ’90s, Kevin Costner would be looking to direct.From the opening sentence it seems that Meadows is tired of hearing about America's less than perfect role in the world, annoyed to have to write her review, annoyed that Sharpe has written his book at all. Later in the review she writes:
In this bad new world, the Manhattan Company is the government, dispatching a busload of men to get what its [sic] needs — oil, food, trees — from the Indians. The Manhattanites build a settlement, calling it Jamestown, after their boss. The Indians have corn. The settlers have guns. A lot of people die.This is a common enough theme, it's true, and maybe Meadows is right that Sharpe doesn't bring anything new to the material (though I know of several bloggers who disagree). But her review is bad, and she doesn't convince. And her parenthetical question is priceless: "Why is every imagined future post-apocalyptic?" Yeah, hard to credit, that.
Sharpe doesn’t exactly take a gutsy approach to the old ideas. (Why is every imagined future post-apocalyptic, anyway?) War for oil = bad; corporations = eeeevil. And the white man? What a bunch of savages.
Scott Esposito, who has read Jamestown, has a fuller critique of Meadows' review (he quotes from another, silly part of the review, in which Meadows talks about how boring it is listening to or reading about other people's dreams).
Incidentally, I read this review in the print edition of the Review, which just reminded me, yet again, why I think the NYTBR is generally worthless. The cover is black, with a red-trimmed circle (it looks like a dartboard) in the middle, at the center of which is a skull-and-crossbones, above and below which are the words "Bad For You". Images of vice (alcohol, cigarettes, pills) are spoked out towards the edge of the circle. At the bottom of the page is a mock Surgeon General's warning that reads: "Benjamin Kunkel on Nirvana - Joe Queenan on bad books - Diane Johnson on New Age spirituality - Tom Carson on Warren Zevon". Other reviews are of books about drug addiction, smoking, teenagers, gambling, etc. That's right: it's another theme issue. Stuff that is bad, or bad for you.
There's nothing inherently wrong with a theme issue of a publication (although I find this particular theme pandering and uninspired). But the theme issue is apparently one of the few organizing principles available to Sam Tanenhaus. A few weeks ago, there was the "Fiction in Translation" edition. I didn't see this issue, but it got a lot of notice in the blogs--see The Literary Saloon's comment here, as well as Levi Asher's coverage at LitKicks here. In Asher's post he says: "I don't generally love 'theme issues', but the NYTBR can do an issue like this anytime they want." Fair enough, right? We'd all like to see substantial coverage of serious fiction, and especially of fiction in translation, which is too often ignored in this country. An issue devoted entirely to fiction in translation helps, so I have no complaint with that individual edition of the Review. My problem is that it's clear that such an issue is a token. I doubt that the NYTBR is ever going to consistently put out issues that cover serious fiction, translated or otherwise, in a serious way (or even serious non-fiction in a serious way). The Literary Saloon complains about the NYTBR quite a bit (here's a representative post, from just two weeks prior to the "Fiction in Translation" edition), and with good reason--except that I wonder why they and others bother.
In many respects, of course, I'm far from the best person to weigh in on the relative merits of the NYTBR (which is why I usually avoid doing so). I've never liked its coverage of books. This is why I went online in the first place: book review sections didn't come close to filling my need, and, oddly, they still don't. (The Literary Saloon often notes, rightly, that the coverage at the NYTBR is heavily weighted toward non-fiction. It would take a separate post that I'm not likely to write to get into my considerable political problems with the non-fiction coverage itself.) Because I don't like its coverage, I tend not to seek it out. I don't, for example, know how often it actually is organized around a theme, and I really don't care. I do know that I check in every so often (like when I pick up the Times for Aimée), and rarely am I impressed. Obviously, it occasionally includes a good review of a book worth reviewing, but these are exceptions. My assessment of the NYTBR's value, then, arises from personal, but not regular, observation of issues over a period of several years (not just the admittedly worse Tanenhaus era), combined with reading the continuous complaints from other bloggers who seem to care a lot about it. Conclusion: it's terrible. Solution: stop caring.
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